Burnee links for Thursday

Things atheists need to stop saying? MAKE me. | The Atheist Experience
Russell Glasser refuses. (And says why.)

National Secular Society - Lawyer recommends a single, secular oath to be sworn in court
This is a good proposal - can we have it in England please?

Can it be rational for the religious to be non-rational? | Julian Baggini | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Julian Baggini on Plantinga and (although not by name) presuppositionalism.

Paul Wallace: Intelligent Design Is Dead: A Christian Perspective
Say no to a "tinkerer-God".

‘The single most threatening development on faith schools in a decade’: Government backs Church plans to take over many more state schools
Astonishing that the Government appears to be going ahead regardless.

Richard Wilson - Burden of proof: should evidence determine policy? | New Humanist
Evidence-based policy or policy-based evidence?

More Christian double-speak

Last Saturday's Unbelievable? featured another itch-inducing segment from William Lane Craig. I've not yet heard his Cambridge lecture (not even sure I want to), but Justin Brierley broadcast a section of the Q&A, revealing the egregious double standards of religious language that I touched on in a previous post.

In response to a question about whether God needs to be caused (at 45'15"):

...God is omnipotent, omniscient, exists self-existently, is eternal, is morally perfect, and so forth. There are many many attributes that will round out and give you a very theologically rich concept of God, but it's important to see that in Christian thinking, traditionally God isn't a contingent being — that is to say a being that just happens to exist. God doesn't just happen to exist. He's metaphysically necessary — he's a self-existent being. His non-existence is impossible.

In response to the problem of evil and suffering in the world (at 47'02"):

The atheist has to show that it's either impossible or highly improbable that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the suffering in the world, and we're simply not in a position to make those kind of judgements with any sort of confidence. God's morally sufficient reasons for permitting some incident of suffering in your life might not emerge until centuries later, maybe in another country, so that you would have no hope of being able to see what his morally sufficient reason is for permitting this [inaudible] your life. So it's simply impossible for us to make with any kind of confidence these sort of probability judgements when some incident of suffering occurs, that God probably lacks a morally sufficient reason for allowing that. That's sheer speculation.

Craig dismisses the problem of evil on the basis of the impossibility of knowing things about God (describing this as sheer speculation), only seconds after he has claimed all kinds of things about God that he cannot possibly know.

Woo or no? Rupert Sheldrake on BBC Radio 3

Monday evening — it could have been any po-faced radio documentary on theology or abstruse literary criticism, but it was framed by Joan Bakewell's guest as "science". Here's the blurb from the BBC website:

Tonight on Belief Joan Bakewell talks to Professor Rupert Sheldrake. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He's worked at Clare College Cambridge and at the International Crops Research Institute in Hyderabad. During his seven years in India Professor Sheldrake studied the Upanishads, yoga and meditation but then went to live in a Christian ashram. He tells Joan about his journey through Methodism, atheism and Hinduism to the Anglican Church and explains why he finds more blind faith and dogma in the scientific world than among any religious community.

Unfortunately on Rupert Sheldrake's part it was all unsubstantiated assertion. He mentioned the dozens of scientific papers he's published, though didn't identify any in particular. He claimed telepathy is real, and (I think) that he has proved that some dogs can tell when their owners are about to return home. He made out these things were indisputably true, and that he has a theory that explains them. Joan Bakewell was commendably skeptical, and asked him about "morphic resonance" and how it actually works, but he didn't elaborate, other than that telepathy works through "morphic fields".

The half-hour radio programme is available to listen again (in HD sound, no less):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b018nsjk

Rupert Sheldrake has a new book to promote (which to some extent explains why he's on the radio):

Original title, don't you think? And by the way, the Sun is a concious entity.

Late, later, latest episode of Skepticule Extra at last available

I've been busy. Plus, this episode of Skepticule Extra is the first I've done using the "triple ender" technique, designed to overcome problems with the variable quality of Skype by using three separately recorded voice tracks. I think it turned out OK, and if the individual recordings are up to scratch this should be the preferred way of producing a Skype podcast. Having done it once I've discovered there isn't that much extra work involved (although working out how to do it in GarageBand took a while).

SkepExtra-019-20111211

In this episode the three Pauls discuss clerical gay-bashing, Kraussian cosmology, undesirable abortion, televisual archaeology and complementary medical soft-pedalling.

Burnee links for New Year's Day

No power in the ‘verse can stop us | Pharyngula

"Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit."

PZ's call to arms.

The Pope asks Catholics to be stupid « Why Evolution Is True
Jerry Coyne on the Pope's Christmas message (which is a good example of a type of religious language obviously intended to obscure rather than enlighten).

Has religion made the world less safe? - Guest Voices - The Washington Post
I have Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It's a large tome, and will likely take me a fair while to read. But Jerry Coyne has been extolling its virtues, not the least of which is that it's well written — a major criterion for me, given my lack of precious reading time.

Jeff Schweitzer: Secular Guidelines to Moral Living: A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
Regardless of this article's being pegged as a Hitchens tribute it makes a fitting reflection on goals and resolutions at the turn of the year.

Afterword from Lawrence Krauss' New Book - A Universe From Nothing - Richard Dawkins - RDFRS - RichardDawkins.net
A new book from Lawrence Krauss, based on (or at least springing from) his AAI 2009 lecture, will certainly be worth reading. I've recommended the lecture many times; here it is again:

http://youtu.be/7ImvlS8PLIo

Resurrection of the gaps

In "The Resurrection Appearances of Jesus" — Chapter 35 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — Gary R. Habermas announces he "will list ten considerations that favor Jesus's resurrection appearances." Most of this appears to be "eyewitness testimony", but four of these ten considerations are accounts given by Paul in the New Testament. This is eyewitness testimony recorded by one man — a convert whose conversion was so cataclysmic that its location gave its name to such conversions: Damascene. It's well known that converts are often the most devout, the most zealous — consequently their pronouncements are to be regarded with a degree of caution.

"That Jesus' resurrection was the very center of early Christian faith..." doesn't necessarily count towards its status as fact. If a religious sect is being started it needs something to make it special, and a resurrection will fit the bill. The emphasis on the resurrection could have been something early Christian leaders promulgated in order to gain followers, regardless of its truth value. (I'm not saying here that those leaders were deliberately fraudulent, but they would have been aware of which aspects of their faith would be most persuasive to potential converts.)

Habermas uses (and excuses) multiple appeals to authority:

Throughout this essay, I will not assume the inspiration or even the reliability of the New Testament writings, though I think these doctrines rest on strong grounds.  I will refer almost exclusively to those data that are so well attested that they impress even the vast majority of non-evangelical scholars.  Each point is confirmed by impressive data, even though I can do no more than offer an outline of these reasons.

If he's not assuming the reliability of the New Testament writings, how can he use them to support his case?

We must be clear from the outset that not only do contemporary scholars not mind when points are taken from the New Testament writings, but they do so often.  The reason is that confirmed data can be used anywhere it is found.

But of course he's not going to use any data that supports a contrary case, only implicitly asserting that it inhabits tiny spaces left over when he says "...the vast majority of non-evangelical scholars", or "...comparatively few skeptical scholars...", or "Few conclusions in current study are more widely held by scholars...", or "Most scholars who address the subject think that...", or "...scholars usually agree that...", or "Virtually no one, friend or foe, believer or critic, denies that...", or "It is almost always acknowledged that...", or "...the vast majority of contemporary scholars conclude that..."

Habermas's case appears to be a "resurrection of the gaps" argument. He claims there's no natural explanation for the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and that therefore Jesus rose from the dead. First, this is an argument from ignorance, and second, the burden of proof is on those making the extraordinary claim. The evidence from scripture is shaky at best: note that there are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus actually rising from the dead — it's all post hoc supposition, with Habermas and other apologists filling in the gaps themselves with events they want to believe happened.

It's not up to anyone else to disprove the resurrection, because it hasn't been sufficiently established to begin with. I can't account for what goes on in the mind of a religious zealot, but I am highly suspicious of any extraordinary event reported by eyewitnesses. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, and if those accounts are mostly reported second-hand by one individual with his own agenda we have good reason to be skeptical. I may not personally have a definitive explanation for the scriptural accounts, but I don't need one. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to disprove.

---

4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952867

A Facebook exchange on hellish religious language

Here's a Facebook conversation from a few days before Christmas. The thread (of which this is a part) is now buried deep down in the Unbelievable group and therefore probably not worth reviving, but I wanted to record my final comments for the sake of completeness, and to clarify my own thoughts:

Daniel Smith Sam, some Christians argue that language of hell and eternal torment is figurative for cessation of existence; it does not refer to literal conscious torment for eternity. This view is called annihilationism.

Other Christians, like myself, take the imagery of hell (fire and brimstone, etc....) to be symbolic. After all, it is difficult to see how there could be "outer darkness" in a literal furnace, so one of these texts at least must be understood non-literally. if humans were made for relationship with God, then to be separated from God for eternity would be a type of torment, albeit self-inflicted.

And as you guessed others, perhaps most, think that a literal furnace exists where the damned suffer eternally.

Point being, there is a range of views, and the issue is not at all settled, especially between the second and third conceptions of hell.
19 December at 05:07 · Like

Paul Jenkins ‎@Daniel, this is why I find religious language unhelpful. If someone threatens to beat me to a pulp, and I interpret that "figuratively" as nothing more than a threat to scowl disapprovingly at me, at the very least this indicates a failure of communication.
19 December at 09:42 · Like

Daniel Smith Paul,

I think your language is just as unhelpful. Figurative language is not "religious language." It's jut the way humans communicate. I don't say that I find scientific language unhelpful because "the sun rose at 6:53 A.M." is not literally true. Or at the end of a long day of work, "I am dead tired" is not literally true. Or "sometimes my wife has to whip me into shape," is (usually) not literally true. The fact that religious texts use language which all of us use every day is neither a defect in religion nor in religious language.

If someone threatens to beat you to a pulp, you take them literally in that you think they literally will beat you, but not literally "to a pulp." So even this implies a bit of figurative speech which needs to be interpreted. Easy to point the finger at religion, though. Maybe you should acknowledge that things just aren't always as clear as you want them to be.
19 December at 19:24 · Like

Paul Jenkins Daniel,

I acknowledge that things aren't always as clear as I'd like, and that there is a difference between being "beaten to a pulp" in the figurative sense and being beaten to a pulp in an electric blender. Both the figurative sense and the literal sense, however, would involve blood and mangled flesh rather than, say, superficial bruising. Therefore I maintain that my figurative use of "beaten to a pulp" is a legitimate use of language that conveys my intended meaning with a degree of accuracy.

This cannot be said of the difference between "literal conscious torment" in the "fire and brimstone" of a literal furnace on the one hand, and "cessation of existence" on the other. The two are not remotely comparable. The claim that one is a symbolic expression of the other contributes more to obfuscation than clarity.
20 December at 00:31 · Like

Daniel Smith Therefore you maintain that your use of language, while not literally correct, is correct enough in the context you're using it and for the audience you're communicating with.

I agree with you that annihilationism does not seem to be what passages about fire and brimstone teach. That view is based on other passages. Nevertheless you've conceded the most important thing: that figurative language is constantly is use. This makes it difficult to criticize the Bible on the basis that there are debates about what some passages contained therein really mean to say. I mean, we have the same debates in America about the constitution. This must prove that political language is totally worthless and imprecise, right?
20 December at 22:21 · Like

I do concede that figurative language is in constant use — it's part of what makes conversation interesting and expressive, and it certainly doesn't make political language worthless (although it can adversely affect its precision). But if "fire and brimstone" is figurative or symbolic language, and annihilationism is "based on other passages", at least one of these must be wrong, and in either case the language used to justify them is, indeed, unhelpful.